Ciudad Juárez, with a population of around 2m, lies on the Mexican border with the United States. It has long supplied Americans with illicit goods. During prohibition it was alcohol; today it's drugs. By 2004, the city's main drugs cartel was earning some $12bn a year, three times the budget of the entire Mexican army. As much as 70% of the local economy runs on laundered drug money, and everyone, from politicians to police, is implicated. It is now one of the most violent cities in the world. More than 7,000 people have been murdered there since 2008, when journalist Charles Bowden began researching this book. It is, he says, a city that lives to "the rhythm of casual violence": daily assassinations, kidnappings and gang rapes. In his conversations with the hit men, drug smugglers and rape victims, Bowden builds up an impressionistic yet immensely powerful narrative of brutality, corruption and hopelessness. He writes with heartfelt anger at the inability of either Mexico or the US to halt the violence: "We have helped in part to create a disaster."